I was born. When I was 23 I started telling jokes. Then I started going on television and doing films. That’s still what I am doing. The end.

I’ve been doing comedy longer than I haven’t been doing comedy, as I was performing for three years before I even got on ‚The Tonight Show.‘ There’s truly nothing like it; it’s intense and exhilarating, even though it looks so casual.

That’s when it becomes a business. When you’ve been public a long time, when it’s a career. You do certain films, you sell them.

As long as you live, keep learning how to live.

I’m not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I’m not dumb… and I also know that I’m not blonde.

Television sounded really different than the Ramones sounded really different than us sounded really different than Blondie sounded really different than the Sex Pistols.

To be honest with you, when I got into this I never thought about reviews. I never thought about what people would say about me. I was just a young guy who was excited to become a comedian and an actor and I just wanted to get to do what I got to do.

Obviously, the cinematography of films is art, just as a still shot can be art. If I’m watching a Wes Anderson movie, the colour palettes alone, and the way they’re painted, could be art. With music, you’re a little bit limited, of course, because it’s only audio.

Nobody enjoys the ‚little show about nothing‘ humor more than me, but that is never the way I look at it.

I got my love of animals from the Dr. Doolittle books and my love of Africa from the Tarzan novels. I remember my mum taking me to the first Tarzan film, which starred Johnny Weissmuller, and bursting into tears. It wasn’t what I had imagined at all.

Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.

Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.

Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.

The future of American film lies on television.

In general my children refuse to eat anything that hasn’t danced in television.

In comedy, my strengths are improvisation.

I think television has had a vast, unbelievable impact on us.

I have no interest in gender or race or anything like that. But everyone else is kind of, with their calculating – is this the exact right mix? I think that’s – to me it’s anti-comedy. It’s more about PC-nonsense.

I’m never gonna step away from stand-up. I can’t. That’s what got me where I am, and that’s also my muse. That’s how I stay level-headed. That’s what keeps me going.

When you’re in comedy, people always come up and say, ‚Oh, it must be so hard.‘ It really isn’t hard unless you’re not good at it. If you can do it, its really kind of fun and easy.

The greatest thing about being a comedian is knowing other comedians. And you get to talk to them. Its the most fun.

Crankiness is at the essence of all comedy. My wife and I were discussing the different types of cranky. There’s entertaining cranky, annoying cranky, angry cranky.

Laughter is America’s most important export.

Men don’t care what’s on TV. They only care what else is on TV.

The Four Levels of Comedy: Make your friends laugh, Make strangers laugh, Get paid to make strangers laugh, and Make people talk like you because it’s so much fun.

I do love the films I’ve done in the past. I work hard in my movies and my friends work hard and we’re trying to make people laugh and I’m very proud of that.

I’m spending a year dead for tax reasons.

I hate to mention age, but I come from an era when we weren’t consumed by technology and television.

Only one in four jokes ever works, and I still can’t predict what people will laugh at.

My mother is from another time – the funniest person to her is Lucille Ball; that’s what she loves. A lot of times she tells me she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. I know if I wasn’t her son and she was flipping through the TV and saw me, she would just keep going.

If I had never ventured beyond being a stand-up comic, then I would be sitting in my house today working on my Leonardo DiCaprio impression.

The worst thing that happens to you may be the best thing for you if you don’t let it get the best of you.

I love Steve Carell.

It’s probably not an accident that the films that I care about happen to be about issues that matter to me, stories that I want to tell.

When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, ‚Look, here’s what happened.‘

I take my wife everywhere, but she keeps finding her way back.

I knew by heart all the dialogue of James Dean’s films; I could watch Rebel Without a Cause a hundred times over.

Most of the stuff I do on the show comes out of me just trying to make my friends laugh.

I’ll say things that are serious and put them in a joke form so people can enjoy them. We laugh to keep from crying.

I’ll continue to make the typical Adam Sandler comedies.

What I like about the jokes, to me it’s a lot of logic, no matter how crazy they are. It has to make absolute sense, or it won’t be funny.

When you’re young, you look at television and think, there’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want.

My way of joking is to tell the truth. That’s the funniest joke in the world.

The problem with me, as far as getting married and having a family, is that my comedy is so important to me. So I don’t know if I’ll ever be as good a dad as my dad.

Talent grips us. We are overtaken by the beauty of Michelangelo’s sculpture, riveted by Mariah Carey’s angelic voice, doubled over in laughter by the comedy of Robin Williams, and captivated by the on screen performances of Denzel Washington.

I don’t get up, get dressed, go out, and think, ‚Okay, I gotta find eight jokes.‘

Stand-up comedy is mine: it’s my entity; it’s my brand; I own it. I do it when I want to do it.

If you were going to shoot a mime, would you use a silencer?

On TV the people can see it. On radio you’ve got to create it.

I think it’s brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television – but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.

I love making people laugh. And I love laughing.

A lot of artists fail when they try to act, and they flop. So when I get into acting, it’s going to be to do it well, something good, something of quality. I want people to say, ‚Wow, that movie‘ – or that show or whatever – ‚turned out really well.‘

I know some of the best Dolly Parton jokes. I made ‚em up myself.

Remember that no relationship is a total waste of time. You can always learn something about yourself.

For so many people, television and movies may be the only way they understand people who aren’t like them.

I never even thought of myself as deadpan until someone wrote an article about me about a year after I was doing comedy. There was a paper called the ‚Boston Phoenix,‘ and someone wrote a description of what I was doing and that’s where I first saw ‚deadpan.‘

I learned from the guys before me – Bill Cosby, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, Richard Pryor, just to name a few. These are guys that let it all hang out. What they lived is what they took to the stage.

If you check your ego at the door when it comes to comedy, you’ve got a pretty good shot at making a great movie that you can commit yourself to, you can jump off the proverbial cliff with, and have a great time, and the audiences respond to that.

There’s nothing funnier than the human animal.

We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.

The Canteen Boy, the reason you feel bad for him and you can laugh is because he, and I guess a lot of my characters, they don’t notice they’re getting made fun of. So they’ll say something back that’s not that great a quip, but in their mind they won the argument.